Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

The Times and Wen Ho Lee

On March 6, 1999, The New York Times reported that Government investigators believed China had accelerated its nuclear weapons program with the aid of stolen American secrets. The article said the Federal Bureau of Investigation had focused its suspicions on a Chinese-American scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Two days later, the government announced that it had fired a Los Alamos scientist for ''serious security violations.'' Officials identified the man as Wen Ho Lee.

Dr. Lee was indicted nine months later on charges that he had transferred huge amounts of restricted information to an easily accessible computer. Justice Department prosecutors persuaded a judge to hold him in solitary confinement without bail, saying his release would pose a grave threat to the nuclear balance.

This month the Justice Department settled for a guilty plea to a single count of mishandling secret information. The judge accused prosecutors of having misled him on the national security threat and having provided inaccurate testimony. Dr. Lee was released on the condition that he cooperate with the authorities to explain why he downloaded the weapons data and what he did with it.

The Times's coverage of this case, especially the articles published in the first few months, attracted criticism from competing journalists and media critics and from defenders of Dr. Lee, who contended that our reporting had stimulated a political frenzy amounting to a witch hunt. After Dr. Lee's release, the White House, too, blamed the pressure of coverage in the media, and specifically The Times, for having propelled an overzealous prosecution by the administration's own Justice Department.

As a rule, we prefer to let our reporting speak for itself. In this extraordinary case, the outcome of the prosecution and the accusations leveled at this newspaper may have left many readers with questions about our coverage. That confusion -- and the stakes involved, a man's liberty and reputation -- convince us that a public accounting is warranted.

In the days since the prosecution ended, the paper has looked back at the coverage. On the whole, we remain proud of work that brought into the open a major national security problem of which officials had been aware for months, even years. Our review found careful reporting that included extensive cross-checking and vetting of multiple sources, despite enormous obstacles of official secrecy and government efforts to identify The Times's sources. We found articles that accurately portrayed a debate behind the scenes on the extent and importance of Chinese espionage -- a debate that now, a year and a half later, is still going on. We found clear, precise explanations of complex science.

But looking back, we also found some things we wish we had done differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt. In those months, we could have pushed harder to uncover weaknesses in the F.B.I. case against Dr. Lee. Our coverage would have been strengthened had we moved faster to assess the scientific, technical and investigative assumptions that led the F.B.I. and the Department of Energy to connect Dr. Lee to what is still widely acknowledged to have been a major security breach.

The Times neither imagined the security breach nor initiated the case against Wen Ho Lee. By the time our March 6 article appeared, F.B.I. agents had been looking closely into Dr. Lee's activities for more than three years. A bipartisan congressional committee had already conducted closed hearings and written a secret report unanimously concluding that Chinese nuclear espionage had harmed American national security, and questioning the administration's vigilance. The White House had been briefed repeatedly on these issues, and the secretary of energy had begun prodding the F.B.I. Dr. Lee had already taken a lie detector test; F.B.I. investigators believed that it showed deception when he was asked whether he had leaked secrets.

The Times's stories -- echoed and often oversimplified by politicians and other news organizations -- touched off a fierce public debate. At a time when the Clinton administration was defending a policy of increased engagement with China, any suggestion that the White House had not moved swiftly against a major Chinese espionage operation was politically explosive.

But the investigative and political forces were converging on Dr. Lee long before The Times began looking into this story.

The assertion in our March 6 article that the Chinese made a surprising leap in the miniaturization of nuclear weapons remains unchallenged. That concern had previously been reported in The Wall Street Journal, but without the details provided by The Times in a painstaking narrative that showed how various agencies and the White House itself had responded to the reported security breach.

The prevailing view within the government is still that China made its gains with access to valuable information about American nuclear weaponry, although the extent to which this espionage helped China is disputed. And while the circle of suspicion has widened greatly, Los Alamos has not been ruled out as the source of the leak.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

The article, however, had flaws that are more apparent now that the weaknesses of the F.B.I. case against Dr. Lee have surfaced. It did not pay enough attention to the possibility that there had been a major intelligence loss in which the Los Alamos scientist was a minor player, or completely uninvolved.

The Times should have moved more quickly to open a second line of reporting, particularly among scientists inside and outside the government. The paper did this in the early summer, and published a comprehensive article on Sept. 7, 1999. The article laid out even more extensively the evidence that Chinese espionage had secured the key design elements of an American warhead called the W-88 while showing at the same time that this secret material was available not only at Los Alamos but ''to hundreds and perhaps thousands of individuals scattered throughout the nation's arms complex.''

That article, which helped put the charges against Dr. Lee in a new perspective, appeared a full three months before the scientist was indicted.

Early on, our reporting turned up cautions that might have led us to that perspective sooner. For example, the March 6 article noted, deep in the text, that the Justice Department prosecutors did not think they had enough evidence against the Los Alamos scientist to justify a wiretap on his telephone. At the time, the Justice Department refused to discuss its decision, but the fact that the evidence available to the F.B.I. could not overcome the relatively permissive standards for a wiretap in a case of such potential gravity should have been more prominent in the article and in our thinking.

Passages of some articles also posed a problem of tone. In place of a tone of journalistic detachment from our sources, we occasionally used language that adopted the sense of alarm that was contained in official reports and was being voiced to us by investigators, members of Congress and administration officials with knowledge of the case.

This happened even in an otherwise far-seeing article on June 14, 1999, that laid out -- a half year before the indictment -- the reasons the Justice Department might never be able to prove that Dr. Lee had spied for China. The article said Dr. Lee ''may be responsible for the most damaging espionage of the post-cold war era.'' Though it accurately attributed this characterization to ''officials and lawmakers, primarily Republicans,'' such remarks should have been, at a minimum, balanced with the more skeptical views of those who had doubts about the charges against Dr. Lee.

Nevertheless, far from stimulating a witch hunt, The Times had clearly shown before Dr. Lee was even charged that the case against him was circumstantial and therefore weak, and that there were numerous other potential sources for the design of the warhead.

There are articles we should have assigned but did not. We never prepared a full-scale profile of Dr. Lee, which might have humanized him and provided some balance.

Some other stories we wish we had assigned in those early months include a more thorough look at the political context of the Chinese weapons debate, in which Republicans were eager to score points against the White House on China; an examination of how Dr. Lee's handling of classified information compared with the usual practices in the laboratories; a closer look at Notra Trulock, the intelligence official at the Department of Energy who sounded some of the loudest alarms about Chinese espionage; and an exploration of the various suspects and leads that federal investigators passed up in favor of Dr. Lee.

In those instances where we fell short of our standards in our coverage of this story, the blame lies principally with those who directed the coverage, for not raising questions that occurred to us only later. Nothing in this experience undermines our faith in any of our reporters, who remained persistent and fair-minded in their newsgathering in the face of some fierce attacks.

An enormous amount remains unknown or disputed about the case of Dr. Lee and the larger issue of Chinese espionage, including why the scientist transferred classified computer code to an easily accessible computer and then tried to hide the fact (a development first reported in The Times), and how the government case evolved. Even the best investigative reporting is performed under deadline pressure, with the best assessment of information available at the time. We have dispatched a team of reporters, including the reporters who broke our first stories, to go back to the beginning of these controversies and do more reporting, drawing on sources and documents that were not previously available. Our coverage of this case is not over.

We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports,
and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

A version of this editors' note appears in print on September 26, 2000, on Page A00002 of the National edition with the headline: The Times and Wen Ho Lee. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe